


Death on Repeat

by Maldoror_Chant



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Winchester Has Self-Worth Issues, Dean keeps dying or almost dying, First Meeting, Hell and Monsters, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Overall sticks to timeline, Situated in seasons 1 to 3, Some divergence inasmuch as extra cases and events are mentioned in passing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-19 23:08:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20665337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maldoror_Chant/pseuds/Maldoror_Chant
Summary: It’s a big surprise when Dean dies the first time around. Well, to clarify, it’s not dying that comes as a shock. He’s a hunter, it’s rather expected he’ll die young and bloody, just… not more than once.





	Death on Repeat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cutelittlekitty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cutelittlekitty/gifts).

> Written for FicFacers 2019, a charity event featuring a metric ton of talented authors and artists, do check it out (they're having a [ raffle](https://www.juliahouston.com/fic-facers/raffle-2019) at present!)
> 
> Prompt was to run with one of Cutelittlekitty's ideas of Dean repeatedly dying or almost dying, before finally figuring out why...

It’s a big surprise when Dean dies the first time around. Well, to clarify, it’s not dying that comes as a shock. He’s a hunter, it’s rather expected he’ll die young and bloody, just… not more than once.

Okay, so technically he’s only dead for a minute before Sam brings him back (not thinking about getting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from his baby bro _not thinking about that-_), but it’s only a temporary reprieve. The souped-up tazer that took out the leatherhead has also done for Dean’s heart. The doc gives him a few weeks at most, and while he’s waiting for death to catch up with him a second time, Dean learns two things. 

Thing One: in this kind of situation, Sam will go to any lengths to get Dean off of death row, even sinking as low as fucking faith healing. For normal folk, it’d be a waste of good money. For monster magnets such as the Winchesters, Sammy’s bright idea ends up accidentally killing this other poor dude; a teacher, a human rights activist, the kind of guy for whom the expression ‘pillar of the community’ is coined. But can it really be said to be accidental? Sure, Sammy didn’t _mean_ for teacher-guy to die, but he had to know that any successful cure would somehow, _somehow_, be a life for a life. There’s no such thing as a miracle. Not for Dean, at any rate. His life, a short-lived weapon forged by his dad with no other purpose, just isn’t worth that much. 

Yeah, that’s Thing Two Dean learns. That even at death’s door, he’s not worth a return phone call from their father. 

Fair enough.

Dean gets a little careless after that. 

\---

“Dean,” Sam chides in his patented nanny voice as he bandages up his brother’s palm. What’s he bitching about? It’s not like Dean got chewed on by a werewolf or a skinwalker; this lil’ booboo will heal in no time. It wouldn’t have healed if it’d connected with Dean’s carotid, where the ghoul was initially aiming, but luckily the bastard’s foot slipped on an old well-gnawed tibia, and so he chomped down on Dean’s raised hand instead of his throat. And for a hunter like Sam, breaking down the door to an abandoned crypt and finding his bleeding brother wrestling with a copy of himself isn’t cause for panic, it’s a Tuesday. They know how to sort that shit out and apply first aid afterwards, no big deal. 

“These days, everyone agrees that multiple concussions are a really bad thing, even the NF-bloody-L,” Sam says in his pissiest tone as he helps Dean out of the haunted house, Dean’s legs as cooperative as cooked spaghetti after that brutal head-to-wall contact back there. Dean grunts, because nodding and talking hurt. He lets the little flashes of light in his vision distract him from the nagging. Lucky he’s got a hard head, another guy’s skull woulda caved in. 

“What the hell was that?! You were supposed to wait for me!” Sam shouts, waving a now-useless machete around at the three dead critters, strewn around in pieces throughout the room which is doing slow spins around a pummeled Dean. That really was a close one… Dean’s good enough to go toe-to-toe with two vampires, but three? No, that shoulda been a certain one-way ticket outta here. Fortunately when he kicked the china cupboard at the third asshole, desperately trying to buy himself enough time to finish off the guy’s two compadres, the stupid fanged bastard managed to trip on its legs and fall into its glass panel head first, doing a fairly decent job of self-decapitation, at least decent enough to last until Dean came over and finished the job. 

“Don’t you dare say anything stupid! That’s the second time in six months I had to give you CPR, Dean, and I don’t enjoy it any more than you do!” Sam hollers, stress running through his voice and making it titter on a dangerous edge. He tries to defuse it by rubbing his mouth against his sleeve theatrically. His hand is shaking. Dean tries to say something smart, but coughs up more water instead. Lake monsters have an unfair advantage against air-breathing hunters. When they pulled him under and held him down, dark water invading his aching lungs, Dean died again. But then Sam arrived at just the right spot at the edge of the night-shrouded lake, more by luck than design, and the harpoon gun worked as expected. Now Dean has to hork up half a lake’s worth of water before finding some whiskey to drown in, and forget what it felt like to wake up with Sam’s mouth fastened on his _again_. 

“Will you stop risking your life all the time?! What do you think you have to prove?!” Sam yells over the head of the dazed and bloodied innocent bystander Dean saved by distracting the monster about to eat her, not that anyone is thanking him. Not that he’s doing this for the thanks, or for approval, or for the job per se, or for anything he can really pin down anymore. 

To be clear, Dean isn’t exactly trying to die, okay? But he’s not exactly putting the odds of survival on his side, either. He’s not chasing after death, but he’s sure flirting with her like she’s the prettiest girl in the room. 

But like the class act she is, death wants nothing to do with either Dean or Dean’s strange habit of surviving the odds. No, death ain’t no cheap date. She wants only the best.

She wants John Winchester. And she finally gets him. 

\--- 

Despite Dean’s life not being worth a shit, his dad died and got himself _damned_ for him, leaving him with nothing more than an exhortation to kill Sam if need be. Like Dean really needs to be the last man standing of his entire family. They haven’t yet invented the flavor of survivor’s guilt that would require. 

But it’s his father’s dying wish. Can he really refuse that?

Can he _not?_

Caught between a rock and a hard place, Dean starts to get really careless. 

\---

So it turns out, salamanders are slimy stupid critters, except those born from the ashes of a witch burned at the stake. Those look like slimy stupid critters, but when exposed to naked flame, they burst into a fire that can’t be extinguished until it has consumed all it touches. Dean’s pretty sure that’s never been featured on the National Geographic channel, and he’s well acquainted with their programming after sleeping in too many motels that didn’t have pay per view.

Also not mentioned in any documentary, not even Fatal Attractions, is the fact that present-day witches collect the dumb beasties in order to light magical fires for not-good-reasons. 

The impressive mansion is an inferno by the time the Winchesters arrive, having tracked down the purchaser’s address from a bewildered pet store owner. That fire is gonna burn until there is nothing left. The only course of action is to run in and get the two kids out. Dean leaves Sam behind to babysit while he runs back in and gets the mom and dad out. Then he runs back in and gets the deadbeat uncle out, the one living in the family’s basement suite while he tries his hand at witchcraft in order to better his lot. Dean clocks him in the jaw in passing, just because, but he still gets him out. 

Then he runs back in for the dog. Yeah, yeah, stupid move, but Sam woulda cried big fat tears if the dog died, even if the rest of the family made it out in time. 

Turns out, the dog was pushing it.

Dean and the dog are halfway through the fancy-shmancy foyer when the writhing, almost living fire of the salamander eats away at some vital support somewhere and the house shudders and starts to list. Right over Dean’s head, the cathedral ceiling makes a horrible, sickening _crack_. It breaks cleanly off at the arch and comes swinging down at him like a rolled-up newspaper aiming at a fly, roughly three hundred pounds of drywall, insulation, wooden beams and roof, most of it on fire.

Dean flinches and hunches over the dog, _thisisit-_

An equally gruesome crack rings out like a gunshot on his left. An exposed wall beam - one of those inserted in the wall that’s burning like a catherine wheel - nearly explodes out of the drywall under the pressure of the sagging roof. It tumbles a foot to the right, lands next to Dean with a thump that shakes him from toe-bones to teeth, sags and then judders as the falling ceiling lands on it, forming a structure like a lopsided mantel right over his head, ash and a couple of embers peppering his hair.

In the center of an upright burning triangle, Dean gapes. The fire roars. The dog squirms and bites him on the thumb.

The last turns out to be the only injury that needs the first aid kit before the brothers hit the road again. 

\---

Dean wakes up to the overly familiar beep - beep - beep of a heart monitor. He stares up at yet another hospital ceiling, then he glances to one side where his humongous brother managed to wedge himself into a small plastic chair. Even fast asleep, Sam has an epic bitch face going, though Dean has the vague impression that this time, he got brought back to life by an ambulance crew when he crashed in their vehicle, rather than through Sam’s reluctant CPR… Memories slip and slide through Dean’s noggin, ghosts, a sad werewolf, killer clowns, a burning house, shapeshifters-... he can recall a smorgasbord of horrors but not specifically how he ended up in an ambulance this time around...

He opens his mouth to ask his brother what nearly got him on this particular occasion, but then decides he doesn’t care enough. Let the big baby sleep, and maybe he won’t be too cranky come morning.

\---

Then there’s the djinn. That’s an entirely different kind of death-or-near-death experience (and Dean is becoming quite the connoisseur.) 

The weird thing is, if the illusion was supposed to be a perfect life… why weren’t Dean and Sam close in the mirage? Like Dean could ever be happy with Sam calling him ‘practically a stranger’. That seems like a big detail to overlook. Djinn musta screwed up big time. Stupid monsters, can’t even rely on them to kill you kindly anymore, no, they have to bungle it and force you to fight your way out of a dream-turned-nightmare. 

Otherwise… it’d have been easy to let go.

Not that Dean ever seems to get that option. Death still doesn’t want him. No, she wants Sam this time. 

She gets him in the end, lying in the rain and mud of some deserted ghost town, but Dean isn’t going to take that lying down. No sir, not again. 

\---

One crossroad deal later, Dean has a definite expiry date. Sam is as distraught as only Sam can get, but Dean is secretly… well, almost relieved. He’s saving Sam, and all it cost is a life that doesn’t serve any purpose other than killing and getting killed. Yeah, Dean is finally going to get off the merry-go-round for good, instead of having one foot off and one foot on, hopping along like an idiot. ‘Bout time. Next time Dean Winchester kicks the can, that’s _it_. Put a fork in him, he’s done.

Or so he reasonably thinks, until Tuesday happens. Repeatedly.

The first step in addressing a problem is admitting that you have a problem, so Dean is getting ready to admit that he might have a problem. Specifically, a death problem. A risky lifestyle is one thing, but dying for an untold number of consecutive Tuesdays, that’s… just weird, even factoring in a Trickster. 

More annoyingly,_ none of these demises actually stick._ They just drive Sam into mega-mother-hen mode. 

\---

Dean looks at the bottle the bartender’s put on the counter in a desperate bid to get Dean out the door so she can close. He’s paid for it, he intends to leave with it and finish the party-of-one on the way back to the motel, but something, the way his body feels, a raw twinge of pain deep inside, tells him that taking it is a massive bad idea.

He takes the bottle.

It’s a massive bad idea.

He’s cutting through the podunk town’s railway yard when he collapses. He can’t move his hands, his legs, he hasn’t felt his face in over ten minutes-... his ears are ringing like fucking church bells, his lungs keep seizing- of all the things that coulda bled him, gutted him or chowed him down, he’s gonna die of fucking alcohol poisoning.

_(But it’s better this way. Sure, I’m going to hell, but its happening sooner or later, and if I stick around the full year, Sammy is_ bound _ to find a stupid way out of the deal and pay the price, so best get it over with-)_

A train clatters by the yard, burying him in sound. Clickety clack! Clickety clack! Clickety clickety clickety-

Dean is floating in amber like he’s at the bottom of a glass of bourbon. Curled up into a ball, he can’t move, but he can still see his surroundings, like he’s somehow looking out the back of his skull. The room he’s in gives him a jarring sense of deja-vu, as if he’s seen it repeatedly in dreams or in other circumstances he can’t place right now… The old-fashioned wallpaper peeling at the corners, the sagging couch, the piles and piles of books ornamented with the occasional empty bottle teetering around a desk, a precarious shrine erected around the room’s inhabitant: a bearded guy in a mangy bathrobe hunched over the keyboard of a laptop, typing furiously.

“You know, Dean,” the guy grouses without looking away from the screen, “this is getting out of hand. At first I was okay with it. Bit of an edgy leitmotif, right? See how many times a character can die or nearly die? Underlines the danger and darkness of your path, and sure puts a pin in where your mind’s at. But now it’s stretching credibility, and I’m running out of ways of writing you out of it.”

The grumbling and the clicking of the keyboard get wrenched sideways and hammered flat by the sound of a train screeching to a halt nearby. Dean wakes up with a gasp, flops over and spends the next thirty minutes hurling up every drop of booze he’s ever consumed, and then some.

Makes him swear off alcohol for almost a whole week.

\---

After that, Dean slows down a little on the death-baiting, as much as he can what while being a hunter and all. No need to hurry, right? His year is almost up. 

\---

His year is up. Dean tries, Sam tries, Bobby tries, even fucking Ruby tries, but it doesn’t matter. It ends bloody, as he always knew it would. It ends, finally. 

Sort of.

\---

There’s no describing Hell. You can’t. You say, ‘it’s terrible’, and that’s just a word that’s been applied to other things like car accidents and wars and badly burned pop-tarts. 

There’s no word strong enough, is the point. So Dean… he BECAME. Standing there, slowly pulling out some poor soul’s guts, he became the word that describes that place, one of many, a paean of sin ringing out loud enough to profane the very heaven.

Heaven takes umbrage. 

For some reason, this seems to surprise the demons. Dean, well, he hasn’t been there all that long - forty years? More? Less? Time, like words, don’t hold sway here, but he knows he hasn’t been here all that long compared to others, yet he’s not surprised that anything holy won’t abide such filth, such evil, such depravity as the likes of Dean and his fellow cohorts.

The attackers are said to be angels. Hard to believe, but there you go. Dean hasn’t spotted any yet. He’s kind of curious to see what they looked like and if they _can rip-bleed-tear._ But yeah, frickin’ angels are attacking Hell in general and his little circle of it in particular.

The attack hammered its way into the plains of Gehenna eons ago, shortly after Dean arrived. Hell threw everything back at its attackers, but there are some things even the abominations of the Pit can’t stop, merely delay. The advance of the angels is inexorable, a little more each day/minute/century/whatever, like a fire burning, consuming and purifying all before it, killing demons and damned souls alike. 

Dean’s in that batch, which means he might actually die. As in, cease to exist (have to be clear on that point, he is already dead after all, right?) In fact, with angels of the Lord gunning for anything remotely Hell-related, death is pretty damned sure right now, yet Dean can’t quite seem to wrap his head around the fact that it might actually happen to him. It takes him awhile to tease the reason for his doubts out of his oldest memories; so much harder than teasing fingernails out of their beds. 

“It’s weird, right?” Dean says - he’s gagged the ragged thing strapped to his torture table so that the screams don’t interrupt his monologue. This isn’t a masterpiece, not one of those he makes to impress Alastair, it’s just a job some demon mook handed him. Dean is getting a lot of overtime, covering for Hell’s finest who are off fighting. For some reason, the infernal army doesn't want Dean on the front line. Sure, he’s not actually a demon yet; still only a damned soul, so very, very damned. But he can already fight better than a lotta demons down here, as he’s shown on numerous occasions (Alastair loves to egg him on.) No matter. The sound of fury is getting closer, flashes of pure bright light regularly shatter a darkness that’d seen nothing more than molten red or wet crimson since creation began, and in Dean’s estimate, this little torture room deep in the Pit is gonna _be_ the front line soon enough- “What was I saying? Oh, right. I remember. It happened to somebody else, right? This other Dean. This human Dean. A long time ago. But he died. Like, a lot. A stupid number of times, and he- hey.” _Slap!_ “Pay attention. No passing out just yet. Just because you’re getting the standard package, doesn’t mean I don’t do good work.”

The flayed thing on the table squirms. Satisfied, Dean taps the bloody knife against his bottom lip. 

“He didn’t really put it together at the time, because he had a risky profession combined with a suicidal attitude, but yeah, the number of close squeaks and out-and-out deaths Dean went through should have caught his attention. I guess he was always walking around with a foot down here, but why it took so long to-”

Dean can’t remember sunlight anymore, but he’s pretty sure this light has nothing to do with it. This light is a solid thing, an entity in its own right; it tears through Hell, guts it raw and bleeding, blows open Alastair’s dungeon like a rotten corpse full of maggots that writhe and scream and turn to ash. Dean - Dean is still alive, but only for a few seconds now surely, even the soul he’d been torturing has finally met a mercy that it had no right to expect down here, and the Light roils forward, burning all in its path, heading straight towards Dean.

At last.

Pain explodes in his shoulder. Dean’s damned soul is wearing a memory of his human corpse, like he usually does down here when he needs actual hands to do the work. The venomous pseudo-body he inhabits bursts into fire like phosphorus and now he’s really gonna die-

The room, the burning torture implements and Hell itself gets skewed sideways as Dean is yanked upwards.

His shoulder is made of pain besides which even Alastair’s work pale in comparison. Okay- surely any second now- his entire being is burning away into ash and so surely he’s now gonna-

In Hell’s bleak soundscape made of screams, curses and insane giggles, a single clarion trumpet rings out like the incarnation of every beautiful memory he’s ever had, and a thousand voices cry: “Dean Winchester is saved!”

What. The actual. Fuck.

Dean might have said that out loud, maybe not. He actually doesn’t have a throat at the moment, so probably not. The demonic is burning away, atomized by that light, and yeah, goddamnit, there’s still something there, deep inside Dean, a stubborn fleck of humanity that’d kept on resisting his change into a full-blown demon, the little grain of sand that even Alastair and his cronies hadn’t yet worn down. The little speck is a seed, and a body - a human body - is growing from it and around it at full speed; it’s now a human shoulder that’s being gripped as Dean is hoisted up and up and ever higher. The plains of Gehenna are already far below him, as small as a picture in a book written by someone truly demented.

But that means-...

...Dean has the ominous feeling he is indeed going to escape death once more. A crazier escape than all the others combined and yeah, it’s as clear as the writing on the wall, this is no coincidence, it never has been, Dean is and has been brought back all those times for a purpose.

This doesn’t do much for him. He’s had a purpose since he was four, and like this weird miracle that’s dogged him, hounded him and kept him alive, his purpose hasn’t given him that much to look forward to. His throat now being mostly rebuilt, Dean decides he’s going to object. 

“DAMN IT! LET ME FUCKING DIE ALREADY!”

“No.”

Dean gets distracted from the way his liver his reconstituting itself (uncomfortably) and finally thinks to glance up at whatever - or rather, whoever - is pulling him out of the Pit and back to life willy nilly. 

_Oh._

There’s a man holding him by the shoulder. Dean’s skin smokes where the fingers grasp him, but Dean’s entire being has been made of pain for decades now, he barely notices. 

Dean’s reality is split between two sets of senses. With fast reconstituting human eyeballs, he stares up at a man dressed like an accountant - jarringly out of place in this hellscape - tie askew, messy hair battered by the speed of their assent, blue eyes fastened on Dean’s… But there’s still enough of the demonic in Dean to see beyond that immediate reality, to peel away the dimension of flesh from its supernatural bones. _That_ Dean can see further than the human body that the creature is using like an oven mitt to hold Dean up safely and get him out of the fire.

The being hauling him out of Hell… 

\- breaks the alphabet and the dictionary just as surely as Hell did, but for the opposite reason. Words like majesty, terrifying beauty, righteous burning light, pop into Dean’s head and flee just as promptly, ashamed that they even tried to capture this sight, the purity, the grace, the wings like heaven made manifest sweeping out, hauling him up up up- The air screams by them. Surely they should be near Jupiter by now at the speed they’re going, yet they’re still only at the edges of Hell. Oh, but there’s light beyond the being’s shoulder. Light. Sunlight, maybe, and they pick up speed. There’s a popping in Dean’s ears as they grow back, sounds like fire crackling, or maybe the sound of a keyboard typing furiously- Dean can’t pay any attention, he can only stare, mesmerized, at the one pulling him ever upward.

Blue eyes and the eternity behind them look back. He’s looking at Dean. At _Dean_. Not looking at him as a useful son/soldier or a responsible big brother, not staring at a hunter or a saviour, not dismissing him as a tool or a weapon. The angel sees… Dean. But there is no horror in that radiant gaze, no judgment, no recoil. He sees, he understands, he accepts, he expects all the best out of Dean even as he takes the worst along with it. He considers Dean worthy of his gaze, and even his forgiveness. 

Dean stares up, the being stares down, the fast-moving world around them forgotten for a moment as something odd happens, a link, subtler than the grip of a hand on Dean’s shoulder yet just as real. The angel looks… intrigued…

Dean can’t look away, even though he knows his eyes are losing whatever protection Hell might have afforded him, and they won’t last a second before bursting into flame if he doesn't look away now but he _can’t_. The bright light is so pure, so beautiful, Dean will never forget it.

Except he’s gonna. Because he has to. A human mind can’t comprehend this, can’t retain this memory without going mad. He can feel it slip away the instant he finally closes his eyes. 

He’s going to forget all about this moment, but a certainty is taking root at a deeper level than his mind. It’s in every atom of the body being woven around his cleansed soul. He knows, deep in his very core, that he’ll find this feeling again one day, even if he can’t remember why, even if he can’t even dream any more about the odd guy in a trenchcoat with a pure burning light in his eyes, looking at Dean as if he is the alpha and the omega of it all-… it doesn’t matter if he forgets; Dean will run into him again one day and the feeling will eventually come back, because it turns out all this time, Dean Winchester hasn’t been repeatedly dying after all, no. He’s been living. And this right here? 

This is why.


End file.
